Post by DrSchadenfreude on Mar 24, 2022 13:47:16 GMT -5
Outstanding, concise summary of Putin's history vis-a-vis Ukraine.
This was recently posted on Facebook by author Will Ruha.
KGB Lt. Col. Putin's 20 Year Scheme to Subjugate Ukraine
My friend, the coup of 2014 was anything but a mere "U.S. sponsored" event. At the crossroads between Asia and Europe, central hub of East-West European affairs, and breadbasket of the former USSR (plus, its richest source of strategic minerals), Ukraine has been coveted and conquered for 2,000 years by every force from the Mongol hordes to the Nazis and Communists. Putin wants Ukraine and has done all he can to prevent its being a self-sustaining sovereign democratic nation, as it successfully sought with its 1991 declaration of independence. FYI:
An economics maven who established Ukraine's democratic-capitalist economy, national currency, modern regulatory system for commercial banking and successfully reduced its hyper-inflation from 10,000 % to a mere 10 %, central banker, Viktor Yushenko is Ukraine's equivalent of America's Alexander Hamilton. During the 1998 Russian financial crisis, he successfully defended the Ukrainian hyrvnia, and composed an economic thesis, "The Development of Supply and Demand of Money in Ukraine," defending it in the nation's Academy of Banking, that earned him an economic doctorate and led to Ukraine's President Kuchma nominating him as Prime Minister. During his term, Yushenko improved the nation's economy.
Enter Vlad Putin, grandson of Lenin's and Stalin's cook, son of a member of Stalin's nefarious NKVD secret police, and himself, for 16 years, a Russian communist KGB officer. During the August 1991, KGB putsch against Gorbachev, KGB officer Putin resigned (i.e., was re-assigned) to enter politics in response to Georgia's and Ukraine's successful quest for independence. Beginning in Leningrad and moving to Moscow in '96, Putin, within 3 years, via nefarious means, including assassination, managed to become Russian Prime Minister. In June 1997, he also addressed economics, defending his dissertation, "The Strategic Planning of Regional Resources Under the Formation of Market Relations." Then, as First Deputy Chief of Presidential Staff for Regions + Head of the Commission for the preparation of agreements on the delimitation of power of regions and the federal center, he ensured that no such agreements were made (and as president, cancelled the 46 agreements signed during Shakhray's term as Commission Head to then create by decree, a vertical power structure consolidating the 89 federal Russian regions into seven administrative federal districts controlled by his appointed envoys rather than via free elections.)
Seeking to prevent independence and secessionist movements in Russia's regions, he became head of the Russian FSB (successor to the KGB) and became a permanent member of the Security Council of the Russian Federation, which led to his presidency. FSB officer Alex Litvinenko related how Putin ordered the assassinations of Russian tycoon Boris Berezovsky and journalist Anna Politkovskaya, and undertook a campaign of terrorist bombings (ala Hitler) designed to bring him to power. Litvinenko, like Berezovsky, was then forced to seek asylum in the UK, which did no good. He was assassinated via plutonium injection by Putin's agent, Andrei Lugovoy. Berezovsky, who made it his mission to expose Putin's crimes, was found hanged to death in his London home.
As Russian president, Putin battled Yushenko and the free-market capitalistic economics he brought to underscore Ukrainian independence, for 15 years arrogating virtual dictatorial power to himself either as Russian president or prime minister, unwilling to relinquish iron-fisted control of Russia and obsessed about securing Ukraine to its former Soviet fold. As such, he has been authoritarian and decidedly neo-communist, as per his machinations in securing the YUKOS oil conglomerate from Mikhail Khodorkovsky and creating vertically-integrated companies in strategic sectors such as Gazprom, Rosneft, and United Aircraft Corp that seek profit, but are mandated to "advance the interests of the nation." But his "vertical control" obsession extended to such former Soviet republics as Georgia, Belarus, and Ukraine, deploying agents in Ukraine to help orchestrate the coalition communist-Ukrainian oligarchs uprising which led to the 2001 no-confidence vote that toppled Yushenko's government. Not to be outdone, Yushenko formed a coalition with Yulia Tymoshenko to replace Leonid Kuchma in the 2004 Presidency of Ukraine against Putin's servitor, Yanukovich, a career criminal thug whose past includes convictions for robbery, assault, and rape.
With their foe ahead in the polls, Putin and Yanukovich then tried to assassinate Yushenko by poisoning him with highly toxic Tetrachlorodibenzo-p-dioxin (TCCD) at a level Swiss medical examiners revealed was 50,000 times above normal levels. The 9/5/04 poisoning by Putin’s agents took place a month before the election and almost killed Yushenko, causing horrific facial disfigurement, but incredibly, he survived. He was poisoned at the home of Volodymyr Satsyuk, deputy head of Ukraine's secret police within its pro-Russian govt opposed to Yushenko and his pro-western economics, ties, and NATO ambitions for Ukraine. Poisoning Yushenko, Satsyuk fled to Moscow where Putin granted asylum, refused his extradition, and conferred Russian citizenship to prevent legal proceedings.
Then, despite a comfortable 11% margin in exit polls, Yushenko had his victory stolen by Yanukovich, via massive voter fraud. This prompted the first major democratic people's uprising, the "Orange Revolution," that toppled him and rightfully brought to the presidency the true victor. This was no U.S. sponsored coup, but an authentic organic, egalitarian-democratic revolt against Putin’s imposition of a Kremlin-friendly criminal into power. Ukrainians recognized Putin's iron fist in all of this, understanding that this lifelong KGB / NKVD secret police terrorist is heir to the Holodomor in which Russian greed and autocratic despotism unleashed genocide against millions of their countrymen. Russian troops and ships in Crimea were the result of Yanukovich selling out Crimea and the Ukrainian people to his autocratic Moscow master in April of 2010.
From the outset, Yushenko’s government was targeted by Putin and his agents as he removed Russia's Black Sea Fleet, joined Georgian president Mikheil Saakashvili in signing the Borjomi Declaration seeking creation of the Community of Democratic Choice, an institute aimed at bringing together democracies and incipient democracies in the region around the Baltic, Black, & Caspian Seas. Thus, Georgia and Ukraine, conquered by the Red Russians, were post-independence, invaded by Russia's army under Putin’s orders. Georgia did what Ukraine seeks, joining the Council of Europe, the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, the Community of Democratic Choice, and other western and Asian entities. These ties, plus US military training, equipment assistance, and construction of the Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhand pipeline incurred Putin's wrath.
With Yanukovich's illegal rise to Ukraine's presidency, his imprisoning of political opponents, his censorship, liquidations of reporters, and betrayal of the Ukrainian people by backing out of the EU agreement in favor of accepting Putin's loans and natural gas price incentives, the democratic people of Ukraine revolted, casting him out a second time, whereupon he fled to Crimea, then Moscow, and pled for Putin's military intervention as a pretext to Moscow's 2014 military seizure of Crimea, ceded to Ukraine in 1955, and now, in 2022, Putin’s full-scale military invasion and illegal terrorist war against Ukraine.
